Stack file size

[John Ridge]

From: Lars Brehmer <larsbrehmer at mac.com>
Reply-To: How to use Revolution <use-revolution at lists.runrev.com>
Date: Thu, 26 May 2005 14:46:43 +0300
To: use-revolution at lists.runrev.com
Subject: Re: Stack file size
<snip>
To be honest, I shy away from using the database solution
for 2 reasons - one, I lack the knoweldge and skills to implement it,
and two, I see on the RevList people with far more skills than I
having all kinds of problems with databases every day, which makes me
even more hesitant.
<snip>

I agree! I think we have very similar problems. The crunch for me comes from
the following: a few years ago, I (foolishly?) showed a friend of mine a
very simple old Hypercard Address Book stack that really met her needs. It
had a "Notes" field, so she could add biographical stuff to her very large
address book, and, vitally, I had also added an "Extract" button, which
selectively output into a Word file a mailmerge database of addresses that,
in their "Notes" field, had a specified tag (three guesses - "xmas" was the
first choice!). This could be used to print standard address labels.

Fine. This was all done with the free version of Metacard - I put the IDE on
her XP machine, so it wasn't actually a standalone. I'm embarrassed about it
now - pretty crude, etc, and I'd love to replace it with my new,
revolutionary version. BUT...

She has a stack of ? 2000 cards. The program and the data are not separated.
If I dream up an improvement to the program (menus instead of buttons, for
example), how do I update her? If her data were in a separate entity, no
problem - I'd simply send her a new standalone, and it would open and read
her records. All I can think of at the moment is that she sends me her
current stack, I try to remember exactly what changes I have made in the
scripting, the properties of objects etc, put all those in, compile the
result and send it back to her. In the meantime (could be a long time) she
can't make any additions to her address book, or we're back to Go again.

This just can't be right. Surely it's the point at which the card metaphor,
great as it's been, has to be developed. The database must be the answer. I
have no idea what "SQL" is, but there's a lot of talk, so presumably I can
find out. 

Obviously, I'm a hobbyist - I script when I have to! But even for people
like me, there's a need to face up to the real world - separating program
from data is what databases are for, and that why the grown-ups use them...

Or have I  misunderstood?